AMP dumps Lotus Notes for Exchange rental

Financial services firm AMP has dumped Lotus Notes, looking to instead rent Microsoft's collaboration tools over the network from the Australian data centres of CSC.

In doing so, AMP - an outsourcing customer of CSC for the last ten years - will become the system integrator's first 'cloud computing' client in Australia.

Microsoft's COS software suite - which includes Microsoft Exchange email, Office Communications Server instant messaging and SharePoint web collaboration - will be delivered from multiple CSC data centres to AMP on a per-seat, per-month basis and for no fixed contract period.

AMP chose to stick with CSC despite evaluating a number of other web-delivered email and collaboration options.

Among them was the rental of Microsoft's collaboration suite directly from Microsoft's Singapore data centre, the rental of Google Apps from the search giant's Japanese data centre and the deployment of IBM's online equivalent, LotusLive.

AMP's IT Director for service management Sharmini Sivathas told iTnews that "extensive pilots were undertaken to evaluate the end-user experience for several platforms."

This review assessed such factors as security, information risk and regulatory requirements, interoperability and integration risk, cost, mobile device support, reliability, support models available, usability and end user feedback.

CSC chief technology officer Bob Hayward said that AMP's choice spoke to the importance of using cloud computing services hosted from within Australia's borders.

"The fact that we were a long time credible supplier to AMP also had a lot to do with it," he said.

AMP said it will now "evaluate cloud based opportunities in other areas," always with "privacy, risk, security and regulatory compliance" in mind.